He’s a man. And he’s 40.
(Or he was 40 during his highly viral moment from 2007.)
And he already sounds fed up with the state of college football in 2024.
Viral college football meme, but also genuinely talented Oklahoma State Cowboys head coach, Mike Gundy made the headlines again recently, this time for blasting the suddenly-professional nature of “amateur” athletics.
The outspoken coach stressed how relieved he was that he can pivot his full attention to football — and only football.
“The good news is, the next five months we can just play football,” Gundy said last week, according to ESPN.
The now-57-year old Gundy added: “There’s no negotiating now. The portal’s over. All the negotiation’s history. Now we’re playing football.”
The coach didn’t stop there, as he soon set his sights on “the business side.”
“The business side of what we do now — we have to have those conversations with [the players],” Gundy said. “Tell your agent to quit calling us and asking for more money. It’s non-negotiable now. It’ll start again in December.
Do you think college athletes should be paid apart from boarding and a scholarship?
“So now we’re able to direct ourselves just in football, and that part is fun.”
Indeed, Gundy and his talented Cowboys team (ranked 17th in the preseason rankings) certainly have the personnel to play spoiler in a deep and talented Big 12 conference suddenly flush with quality ex-Pac-12 teams.
But as the coach alluded to, once most of this fun dies down by the end of the calendar year, this process does begin anew.
Which means questions about payment and “amateurism” will be dredged up again.
The advent of name, image and likeness (NIL) policy payments after a 2021 NCAA ruling saw countless NCAA athletes being allowed to get paid, rather handsomely, in some cases, for their general likeness and name.
For those blessed enough to have a famous football last name, like, say, Manning, those NIL earnings can reach the multi-millions — easily.
And with the massive popularity of the “EA Sports College Football” franchise (which returned in 2024) being a potential source of NIL earnings, college players are simply going to find themselves with more and more sources of passive income.
That means more and more money being pumped into the very same NCAA that once struck down the Southern Methodist University Mustangs with the “death penalty” in 1987 because its football program committed the unforgivable mistake of … paying its players.
Between the wanton conference realignments, massive emphasis on the transfer portal, and the oodles of money available in NIL deals, college football isn’t just drastically different from 1987.
It’s radically different from even just 2007, when Mike Gundy was already a grown man.
